20 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT YOUTUBE

2011 Social Media Timeline

Nutty Korea joins Social Media fever to step up propaganda offensive

Nutty North Korea, one of the world's most reclusive nations, is now twittering.

Less than one month after the communist state started broadcasting propaganda clips on YouTube, North Korea opened an account on Thursday with Twitter Inc., the U.S. provider of a highly popular microblogging service.

The opening, announced Saturday on North Korea's official Web site Uriminzokkiri, comes as Pyongyang steps up its propaganda offensive to deny allegations that its Navy torpedoed a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors.

The North's twitter account, which opened under the name @uriminzok, or "our nation" in Korean, contained nine messages as of Sunday morning. Most of them had links to statements or interviews that denounce South Korea and the United States.

Twitter allows users to send texts up to 140 characters long, known as "tweets." Subscribers, or "followers," can choose to receive feeds via mobile phones or personal computers. 225 people were following @uriminzok as of Sunday morning.

Last month, North Korea registered an account with YouTube, uploading clips that praise its leader Kim Jong-il and defend itself against accusations that it attacked the Cheonan warship.

Background: Nutty North Korea silent on fate of South Korean fishing boat crew

Observers have taken note of North Korea's expanded use of the Internet for its propaganda offensive. In June, a North Korean woman believed to be an agent uploaded a clip praising the communist country on YouTube, drawing media attention here and abroad.

North Korea is also believed to be operating a unit dedicated to hacking foreign websites, including those of the United States and South Korea. Early this year, South Korea set up a cyber defense command to deal with such threats from the North.

The Unreported War - Cyber War

YouTube’s First Video Uploaded Five Years Ago

Yes you have Facebook, Twitter, ect, BUT, In my book, two things has made New Media.

One is Apple iMovie/Final Cut (just had its own 10 year anniversary), putting low cost non-linear editing software in eveybody hands.

Two is YouTube, but one has to ask if it was not for iMovie/Final Cut would YouTube be as big as it is?

Hat Tip to Stan Schroeder & Mashable







Stan Schroeder

Although YouTube’s birthday is officially February 14, 2005, the first video was actually uploaded to the site exactly five years ago, on April 23, 2005.

The video is titled “Me at the zoo.” It was shot by Yakov Lapitsky and it’s only 19 seconds long, showing one of YouTube’s founders, Jawed Karim, at the San Diego Zoo.

The video doesn’t look like much, but it sparked a revolution; by July 2006, more than 65,000 videos were uploaded to the site every day. In October that same year Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion — a reminder of how fast things move in the age of the Internet.

See the first ever YouTube video below...

The first video on YouTube, uploaded at 8:27PM on Saturday April 23rd, 2005. The video was shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo.

Congress-YouTube partnership raises questions

Some high-tech watchdogs are worried about a relationship unveiled this week between popular video-sharing site YouTube.com and Congress.

The Google-owned site launched two new platforms where people can watch videos uploaded by members of the House and Senate. The pairing was endorsed in a welcome message by House Speaker Pelosi, House Minority Leader Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Reid and Senate Minority Leader McConnell that has been viewed more than 230,000 times since Monday.

The announcement, however, is prompting questions about the propriety of lawmakers singling out a commercial Web tool. Critics also cite privacy concerns -- namely, what happens to data collected about users who view lawmakers' videos.

The project was made possible by changes to outdated House and Senate rules last year that clarified the circumstances under which members are allowed to place content on external Web sites. Steve Grove, head of YouTube's news and political content, said in a blog post that the service has "the potential to make Congress more transparent and accessible than ever before."

But the Center for Digital Democracy's Jeff Chester warned Google is "taking a lobbying tactic developed in part by C-SPAN years ago -- offer members of Congress a free service so they can be seen by the public." On his Web site, he warned that such an "electronic or digital campaign contribution helps insure that Congress will think twice about biting -- or regulating -- the video hand that feeds [it]."

Chester and other critics are asking whether Google will be able to incorporate data gathered about those who watch the videos for its growing political online advertising business -- and whether Congress should be endorsing a for-profit enterprise as a principal access point for official government content. Chester also suggested the YouTube union might create a conflict of interest for those charged with regulating Google and other Internet firms. The company came under fire on Capitol Hill in 2008 for its plan to partner with rival Yahoo on an advertising venture. The proposal, which was also the subject of a Justice Department probe, was eventually shelved. Google executives have been grilled by lawmakers on other topics, including behavioral targeting and consumer privacy, and have lobbied on issues like what should be done with spectrum freed up by the upcoming nationwide digital television transition.

Congressional aides familiar with the deal said there was no monetary agreement involved and there is strict separation between official and campaign content on the YouTube channels, just like there is between member's official and campaign Web sites. The rule of thumb, one aide said, is members can use YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services as long as they think of them as extensions of their official Senate sites and not post materials deemed inappropriate for government Web sites. YouTube's arrangement was "an extraordinary accomplishment" because it managed to make a platform that generates money for Google and advertisers but seem like a "free, public utility," an official with another major high-tech company said.

Twitter, Facebook users show solidarity with QassamCount

See my Blog Post 'Israel armed with New Media savvy' for more background...

Twitter, Facebook users show
solidarity with QassamCount

By STEPHANIE RUBENSTEIN,
JPOST CORRESPONDENT IN CHICAGO

As soon as Operation Cast Lead began to take shape just over a week ago, Dan Peguine started the program QassamCount, a system that updates users' statuses on Facebook with the number of Kassams that hit Israel.

Within the first three days, 10,000 people had donated their statuses to the cause.

Peguine first started a program counting Kassams about a week before the operation in Gaza began. He used Twitter, which sends users' statuses to all their "followers," to help people understand how often rockets hit the South.

"When you live in Tel Aviv and you read at the end of the day, '20 Kassams hit Sderot, Ashkelon,' you do not really understand what it means to live through this," Peguine told The Jerusalem Post. "So by having a feed that pops up every time a Kassam hits, I thought it would be a good way to convey this."

After recognizing the quick success of the Twitter program, to which 600 followers had subscribed in three days, Peguine decided to apply the same form to a larger social network. He partnered with Arik Fraimovich and set up the application on Facebook.

"I think that the Internet is a medium that needs to be used to reach audiences that are not usually aware of the situation in Israel," Peguine said.

"We hope to bring to the world's attention the fact that Hamas fires rockets at Israel daily," he said.

The Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF) is another group that has been active in fighting anti-Semitism and terrorism throughout the Internet.

"When it comes to bias against Israel, it's very easy for our enemies to be on the constant attack," said David, the spokesman for the JIDF, who asked that his last name not be published. He said he had received death threats since beginning his activities.

The JIDF formed in response to the second intifada in 2000 and functioned on a grassroots level, mainly through e-mail campaigns. The group then began operating on various Web sites to spread news about Israel and Jewish issues.

The IDF itself has also begun an Internet effort, making use of YouTube and a blog to post official army videos and information about the situation in Gaza. The site on YouTube had nearly 11,500 subscribers as of Sunday, and its videos had been viewed over 750,000 time.

"Throughout the years, we have tried to help shape public opinion with our own brand of Israel advocacy on-line, and it's very refreshing to see Israel taking an active on-line role," David said. "The videos on YouTube showing secondary explosions have had a major impact, as do the videos and photos of all the humanitarian effort."

Israel and the Jewish People have always faced bias in the media, he said, adding that anti-Semitism and a false perception of Israel as an aggressor have played a role.

Israel armed with New Media savvy

The thermal imaging footage shot from an Israeli drone hovering over Gaza shows eight Palestinian militants loading rockets on to a lorry.

Within seconds, the drone’s sights are locked on to the vehicle and it and the ghostlike figures nearby are incinerated in a missile blast.

The clip was one of several dramatic scenes uploaded to the site by the Israeli army last week, the first time a national army has created its own YouTube channel.

Israel is waged 'Operation Cast Lead' on several fronts, including unprecedented use of New Media.

Israeli officials said they are satisfied that Israel is winning sympathetic media coverage that has provided its military with the breathing space it needs to continue the strikes against Gaza.

“Israel has no small measure of understanding and support and even approval from many countries,” Dan Gillerman, a former ambassador to the United Nations, said last week. “Unless something very dramatic happens, such as a blundered hit that kills large numbers of civilians, then we will have enough time to do what we need to do.”

Led by Yarden Vatikai, a former official with the defence ministry and the Jewish Agency, the directorate decided to replace the traditional wartime press conferences with a wide range of initiatives using new media.

“In terms of communicating our message, new media is the future,” said Avi Benayahu, the chief spokesman for the Israeli army, who has organised a series of workshops for his staff over the past six months.

“Explaining your actions is a kind of ammunition in this sort of war.”

The YouTube channel, established the day after the first air strikes, is currently the most popular on the site. The dozen's videos relating to the current operation have recorded hundreds of thousands of hits.

Israel has turned to other New Media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter @IsraelConsulate / Twitter @IDFspokesperson, blogs and chat rooms, often relying on former army personnel and public relations consultants, to advance its case.

In addition, reporters and diplomats have been blitzed with text messages offering interviews, briefings and tours of Israeli communities in the Negev close to the Gaza border. Other initiatives are likely to be unveiled if and when a ground invasion is launched.

“We have photographers embedded in all the units preparing to enter Gaza and we already have incredible footage that we are planning to release [if] we go in,” Dinor Shavit, commander of the Israeli army’s filming unit, told The Jerusalem Post newspaper.

Opposition politicians, including the Likud party head, Benjamin Netanyahu, have set aside their campaigns for the parliamentary election next month and been recruited to the public relations offensive.

Officials believe coverage of Israel’s actions in Gaza have benefited as a consequence. According to a survey by the foreign ministry of the international broadcast media, Israeli spokespeople have been given three times as much airtime as Palestinian representatives.

Daniel Seaman, the head of the government press office, “We know that Hamas is in complete control of the news and that reports from Gaza are carried out under duress. Foreign media in Gaza will become fig leaves for the news, and will give credibility to the reporting.”

YouTubing the Office

Hat Tip to THE AGILE MIND

YouTubing the OfficeComing soon, to an office near you, Web video about your job and workplace--a private YouTube just for your organization.

Google Video for business, launched Labor Day, allows any company, agency, nonprofit, you-name-it to host its own internal YouTube for the enterprise. For a mere $50 a seat, Google will give an organization a secure spot to store videos created by employees, the same viewers and ease of uploading as YouTube users get, but the videos are not available for the public to see.

Without a doubt, many employees soon will be viewing, rather than reading, quarterly reports, messages from the agency head or CEO, instructions, emergency missives, training and more. Heck, the Office of Personnel Management might just film the snowfall as evidence the next time it closes the government in Washington! Just like YouTube, this new app lets viewers rate and comment on videos, no doubt giving rise to a whole new form of office etiquette: artfully responding to videos of higher-ups. Hint: rate 'em high!

As easy as it is to use YouTube once you've got video to share, it's now becoming just as simple to shoot the stuff. Macs come with built-in video cameras--just tilt the screen and shoot. And the new Flip video camera is supremely user-friendly and lets amateur Spielbergs just plug it into the USB port and upload directly to YouTube and now to YouTube for business.

To be fair, there is another company in this market, a 2007 startup called Veodia, but it's hard to imagine Google won't own the space now that it has entered it.

For a workforce as large and far-flung as Uncle Sam's, this promises to be a huge boon for communications, if agencies adopt it. And who knows, with the right acquisition strategy--say a Networx contract for Google--agencies might just get YouTubed for a song. If the District of Columbia can afford it . . .

Announcing a Presidential Forum in New Orleans

New Orleans and Louisiana leaders today announce they are working with Google and YouTube to bring American voices into a forum with Presidential nominees that will address critical issues for the nation's future.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the New Orleans Consortium plan to host the forum on September 18, 2008 at the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. The forum will use Google technology and the YouTube video platform to drive citizen engagement and to create a dynamic, compelling, and constructive live television broadcast.

Did YouTube KILL Hillary, New Media RULE !!

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Hillary’s St. Patrick’s Day Massacre
By FRANK RICH
Published: March 30, 2008

MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?

In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of “sniper fire” into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn’t be true because by the time of the first lady’s visit in March 1996, “the war was over.” Meredith Vieira asked Mrs. Clinton on the “Today” show why, if she was on the front lines, she took along a U.S.O. performer like Sinbad. Earlier this month, a week before Mrs. Clinton fatefully rearmed those snipers one time too many, Sinbad himself spoke up to The Washington Post: “I think the only ‘red phone’ moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place?”

Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a “comedian” and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patrick’s Day. When Michael Dobbs fact-checked it for The Post last weekend and proclaimed it worthy of “four Pinocchios,” her campaign pushed back. The Clinton camp enforcer Howard Wolfson phoned in to “Morning Joe” on MSNBC Monday and truculently quoted a sheaf of news stories that he said supported her account. Only later that day, a full week after her speech, did he start to retreat, suggesting it was “possible” she “misspoke” in the “most recent instance” of her retelling of her excellent Bosnia adventure.

Since Mrs. Clinton had told a similar story in previous instances, this was misleading at best. It was also dishonest to characterize what she had done as misspeaking — or as a result of sleep deprivation, as the candidate herself would soon assert. The Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff. Not that it mattered anymore. The self-inflicted damage had been done. The debate about Barack Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was almost smothered in the rubble of Mrs. Clinton’s Bosnian bridge too far.

Which brings us back to our question: Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded?

Sometimes only a shrink can decipher why some politicians persist in flagrantly taking giant risks, all but daring others to catch them in the act (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Carl Bernstein, a sometimes admiring Hillary Clinton biographer, has called the Bosnia debacle “a watershed event” for her campaign because it revives her long history of balancing good works with “ ‘misstatements’ and elisions,” from the health-care task force fiasco onward.

But this event may be a watershed for two other reasons that have implications beyond Mrs. Clinton’s character and candidacy, spilling over into the 2008 campaign as a whole. It reveals both the continued salience of that supposedly receding issue, the Iraq war, and the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway establishment.

What’s been lost in the furor over Mrs. Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale is that her disastrous last recycling of it, the one that blew up in her face, kicked off her major address on the war, timed to its fifth anniversary. Still unable to escape the stain of the single most damaging stand in her public career, she felt compelled to cloak herself, however fictionally, in an American humanitarian intervention that is not synonymous with quagmire.

Perhaps she thought that by taking the huge gamble of misspeaking one more time about her narrow escape on the tarmac at Tulza, she could compensate for misvoting on Iraq. Instead, her fictionalized derring-do may have stirred national trace memories of two of the signature propaganda stunts of the war: the Rambo myth the Pentagon concocted for Pvt. Jessica Lynch and President Bush’s flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during “Mission Accomplished.”

That Mrs. Clinton’s campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton — though surely knowing her story was false — thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first lady’s foreign trip — as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night — and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.

The Drudge Report’s link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program’s nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest “comeback” on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of “sleep deprivation” and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.

The Clinton campaign’s cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web “chats” and “Hillcasts,” the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are.

Senator Obama, for all his campaign’s Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, we’re learning, can outdraw videos of a candidate’s fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and the full video of Mr. Obama’s speech on race have drawn more views than the most popular clips of a raging Mr. Wright.

But the political power of the Bosnia incident speaks at least as much to the passions aroused by the war as to the media dynamics of the Web. For all the economic anxiety roiling Americans, they have not forgotten Iraq. The anger can rise again in a flash when stoked by events on the ground or politicians at home, as it has throughout the rites surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion and 4,000th American combat death. This will keep happening as it becomes more apparent that the surge is a stalemate, bringing neither lower troop levels nor anything more than a fragile temporary stability to Iraq. John McCain’s apparent obliviousness to this fact remains a boon to the Democrats.

The war is certainly a bigger issue in 2008 than race. Yet it remains a persistent Beltway refrain that race will hinder Mr. Obama at every turn, no matter how often reality contradicts the thesis. Whites wouldn’t vote for a black man in states like Iowa and New Hampshire; whites wouldn’t vote for blacks in South Carolina; blacks wouldn’t vote for a black man who wasn’t black enough. The newest incessantly repeated scenario has it that Mr. Obama’s fate now all depends on a stereotypical white blue-collar male voter in the apotheosized rust belt town of Deer Hunter, Pa.

Well, Mr. Obama isn’t going to win every white vote. But two big national polls late last week, both conducted since he addressed the Wright controversy, found scant change in Mr. Obama’s support. In The Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, his white support was slightly up. As the pollster Peter Hart put it, this result was “a myth buster.” The noisy race wars have failed to stop Mr. Obama just as immigration hysteria didn’t defeat Senator McCain, the one candidate in his party who refused to pander to the Lou Dobbs brigades.

The myth that’s been busted is one that Mr. Obama talked about in his speech — the perennial given that American racial relations are doomed to stew eternally in the Jim Crow poisons that forged generations like Mr. Wright’s. Yet if you sampled much political commentary of the past two weeks, you’d think it’s still 1968, or at least 1988. The default assumptions are that the number of racists in America remains fixed, no matter what the generational turnover, and that the Wright videos will terrorize white folks just as the Willie Horton ads did when the G.O.P. took out Michael Dukakis.

But politically and culturally we’re not in the 1980s — or pre-YouTube 2004 — anymore. An unending war abroad is upstaging the old domestic racial ghosts. A new bottom-up media culture is challenging any candidate’s control of a message.

The 2008 campaign is, unsurprisingly enough, mostly of a piece with 2006, when Iraq cost Republicans the Congress. In that year’s signature race, a popular Senate incumbent, George Allen, was defeated by a war opponent in the former Confederate bastion of Virginia after being caught race-baiting in a video posted on the Web. Last week Mrs. Clinton learned the hard way that Iraq, racial gamesmanship and viral video can destroy a Democrat, too.

The Sacred Fire of Liberty

A great video from my YouTube friend Wyatt @ wyattmcintyreSacrifice, courage and force of conviction built a legacy of freedom, liberty and justice that created the foundation of this noble Republic.

Today, as we watch the gradual encroachment of government in our lives, as we watch the expanding role of a centralized government we are forced to ask where do we stand? Do we stand with those who sacrificed so much to build this great experiment in Democracy or will be the author and finishers of our own destruction, trading liberty for the slow and gradual encroachment of those in power over our lives at the expense of the constitution?

McCain Throws Aide Under the Bus for Twittering YouTube Link

Soren Dayton was a Twitter friend (Soren has deleted his Twitter account) and STILL is a Facebook friend ! And I am a member on the "Support Soren Dayton!" facebook group !

McCain Throws Aide Under the Bus for Twittering YouTube Link

Posted by: Matt Lewis

Today, John McCain suspended an aide -- Soren Dayton -- for distributing this controversial YouTube video about Barack Obama and Rev. Wright. As campaigns spokesperson Jill Hazelbaker told Jonathan Martin, Dayton was "reprimanded by campaign leadership."

I defended John McCain when he distanced himself from that radio show host in Ohio who repeatedly invoked Obama's middle name. To me, the radio host was making a tawdry attack, meant to imply Obama was Muslim. And McCain was doing the right thing by not engaging in that sort of campaign.

But this situation is a bit different.

In reading his Twitter message (shown above), Dayton merely wrote: "Good video on Obama and Wright," and included the link. That's it. And for that, he was suspended.

Here's why I think this move might have been politically unwise. Suspending Dayton for passing this video on implies by extension that the message of this video was in some way incorrect, or, at least, not respectable. But, as I've written in the past, it is entirely legitimate to question Obama's affiliation with Rev. Wright -- as well as to highlight Obama's evolving positions.

From Geraldine Ferraro to Samantha Power, this has been the year for apologies and terminations. My question is whether John McCain is willing to throw everyone under the bus the minute they do something that might be embarrassing to him.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I've been told that campaigns actually attack their opponents from time to time. It is unclear precisely what Dayton's job for McCain was (a source tells Jonathan Martin that Dayton was doing "low-level political work for [deputy political director] John Yob."

Dayton was a fairly prominent blogger, and one would suppose he was doing more than simply "low-level" work. Perhaps he wasn't -- or perhaps this is an example of a McCain aide taking another shot at a guy who is already down.

Still, reprimanding him may cause future McCain operatives to think twice before doing their job. Is McCain recommending a sort of "limited war" in which the enemy can shoot at us, but we can't shoot back?

Standing on principle is a good value, but so is supporting your subordinates and so is loyalty. It takes political courage to stand up for your team -- even if it may cost you politically. Is McCain too concerned about wanting to come across as a nice guy?

Hazelbaker emailed me the following statement (which is the same thing she sent Martin):

We have been very clear on the type of campaign we intend to run and this staffer acted in violation of our policy. He has been reprimanded by campaign leadership and suspended from the campaign.

Though they have been clear on the type of campaign they want to run, it is still unclear if, or when, Dayton will be reinstated.

Of course, it is not unheard of for campaigns to engage in a bit of deception involving the leaking of negative information. For example, it is entirely possible that Dayton distributed it under the direction of a campaign superior. It is possible Dayton believed the campaign would have wanted this out there -- but that not telling them would give them plausible deniably.

It is also entirely possible that he has agreed to be the "fall guy" in an effort to save Senator McCain face. In fact, it is likely this little controversy will result in more people viewing this video -- which would obviously be a net-plus for McCain (who gets to remain above the fray).

But -- because this particular video added little to the narrative -- it is more likely that Dayton merely passed this link on, not knowing it would be a big deal -- and that the McCain campaign has chosen to punish him for this. What Dayton is really guilty of is failing to follow the maxim that you should never interfere when the enemy is in the process of committing suicide.

If McCain has any cause to be angry, it's not that Dayton made an ethical lapse -- it's that he made a political one.

Dayton distributed the video via Twitter. The default setting on Twitter allows anyone to "follow" a Twitterer. In other words, it would have been easy for anybody who wanted to catch Dayton (or any other operative, for that matter) in a gaffe, to sign up to receive his messages.

Most folks who use Twitter, do so in a very casual and personal manner. One source who follows Dayton told me that Dayton most likely didn't think he was Twittering in an "official" capacity. Still, anything you write can and will be used against you.

Dayton has since deleted his Twitter account.

Did the 'So call Power's' in the McCain camp goof up ?

Soren Dayton was a Twitter friend (Soren has deleted his Twitter account) and STILL is a Facebook friend ! And I am a member on the "Support Soren Dayton!" facebook group !

Defending Soren Dayton
Posted by: Patrick Ruffini

Earlier today, Soren Dayton, a friend and frequent collaborator in the blogosphere, was suspended from the McCain campaign for making a note of this video in his Twitter account.

To see Video, click here

A few notes here. I use Twitter a lot. And I'm "looser" on Twitter than I would be on my blog. My Twitter account has been updated 2,863 times since last June, while I've only penned no more than a couple hundred mostly long-form blog entries. My Twitter posts contain a lot of rough thoughts that are then refined into blog posts. So, there's a greater volume of chatter, and the sense that the tool operates more like a secure backchannel than a public blog.

Of course, this is really an illusion. Everything you say on Twitter is publicly accessible, unless you choose to protect your updates for friends only. If you can screencap it, folks in Peoria on the other side of the Fox News filter won't care if it was Twittered or blogged. This is a stark reminder that anything that you write on a social media site, now matter how "protected" is ultimately just as accessible as anything you put out in any other medium. (It didn't take long for people to sniff out "Kristen's" Facebook profile.)

I'm not going to argue that Soren was right in posting the link. But I do agree with Matt Lewis that there was some overreaction here. If they go further with this civility routine, they risk alienating conservatives in talk radio and the blogosphere who are doing the necessary work of defining Obama and rendering him just as radioactive with the base as Hillary.

A month ago, McCain-Obama looked like a bad matchup for us: a Republican nominee who didn't do much to galvanize the base against a Democrat who didn't either.

The New York Times kerfuffle and now the Wright story is slowly changing that. With an assist from Hillary Clinton's overtures to the right-wing of the Democratic Party, Obama is now a more polarizing figure in key swing states than she is. It is now clear that conservative media will do to Obama what they did to Kerry, Gore, and Clinton. This can be an unalloyed boon to the McCain campaign, as it pretty much takes care of his conservative problem and frees him to go after swing voters.

This is not about "Barack Hussein Obama" or Muslim smear emails, which need to be repudiated. It is about a Presidential candidate's literary muse going all Susan Sontag on us on the Sunday after 9/11. It is connecting the dots on the post-patriotic milieu that surrounds Obama seemingly everywhere he goes. These are legitimate issues for public discussion, if not by McCain himself, then certainly by talk radio and the blogs. If McCain doesn't want to be part of that, that's understandable. But he should get out of the way and let talk radio do its thing.

In many ways, the Bush campaign had the right approach with the Swift Boat Veterans. Any functionary or board member who had been connected in any way with the Swift Vets resigned from the campaign. The campaign told them -- and, crucially, any 527 -- to take down their ads. They repeated that they respected Kerry's service -- without turning into a mouthpiece for the Kerry Vietnam narrative.

But nothing was done to single out or disrespect John O'Neill and the other veterans who had earned their right to speak. The tone was firm but respectful.

With this campaign, there has been a tendency to do the necessary distancing, but with sharper words and a sense that freelancers are thrown willfully under the bus. First, Bill Cunningham, who was an important part of Ohio GOTV in the '04 election. Now this.

It is pretty well understood by most serious people that the Rev. Wright is not a racial/foreigner/Muslim issue, nor was it an unprovoked attack on Obama on these grounds, not in the way Ferraro was, or the Somali email that Clinton's staff circulated without reprimand (which was 10x worse than this, btw), or Bill Clinton's South Carolina comments.

I'm not suggesting the McCain campaign traffic in it directly. Politically, they probably had to do what they did today. Most people in this business understand that moves like are a game -- a show -- that the campaigns put on for the media, that won't swing a single vote at the end of the day -- but that if handled poorly, could cascade into a larger issue. See: Clinton, Bill -- South Carolina.

But what I am suggesting is that McCain in the future calibrate his response to different situations, and recognize the value in drawing certain personal contrasts with Obama. Voters are motivated less and less by issues, and more by personalities and narratives. So, a key McCain strategic goal is to turn the Obama persona in against itself, so that the rock star/Messiah/hopeandchange routine turns into a liability in dead-serious times when people are worried about losing their jobs and/or getting killed.

The challenge in modern Presidential campaign is not simply to paint your opponent as wrong on the issues, and to prevail in a civil debate. It is to render the opponent unacceptable to 48% of the electorate, and merely less preferable to 3%. Despite McCain's troubles with the base, conservative media (and Hillary) are doing the heavy lifting on the unacceptable part. McCain should get out of the way, and jump in ONLY when someone crosses a racial and/or religious line.

WMD's Found In Obama's Church !

A great video from my YouTube buddy Gordon Bloyer

The commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time

From my YouTube buddy ConservativeUSA

"As we have been assured, neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, can separate us from God's love. May He bless the souls of the departed. May He comfort our own. And may He always guide our country"

Web politics go beyond YouTube

Web politics go beyond YouTube
By Jennifer Harper
March 5, 2008

Technology-challenged politicians beware: George Allen's infamous "macaca moment" was a little disaster compared to what's to come, according to the Politics Online Conference, which got under way yesterday.

"YouTube moments will be nothing compared to the impact of emerging, disruptive technologies in political space," said Julie Germany, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, which organized the event at the Renaissance Washington hotel.

For the uninitiated, "disruptive technology" is a term for daring innovations — digital photography and e-commerce, for example — which jolt us out of the status quo toward new behaviors.

Such technology is reshaping the presidential election. The conference will showcase political applications of MoSoSo (mobile social software), microtargeting, widgets, UGC (user-generated content), mashups, radical transparency, open source government, wireless engagement, actionable public data and search marketing, among other things.

"It's a matter of pervasive politics. We're looking at a combination of satellite technology, incredibly detailed databases of consumer and voter habits, social networking, online activities. Advertisers can track everything — where you go, what you do. As technology evolves, anonymity slips away," Ms. Germany said.

So does decorum, perhaps. At times, the forum was almost drowned out by the giddy din of attendees as they gleaned free coffee mugs, Gummi candies, trail mix and T-shirts from Yahoo, Google, Politico, ValueClick Media, RealClearPolitics and other sponsors in the back of the room. Meanwhile, much of the multitasking audience was chatting on cell phones, fiddling with laptops or tapping frantically on a BlackBerry.

The experts du jour — slouched onstage with wireless microphones — bickered over marketing phrases such as "dual transparency" and "integrating the chaos factor." They also pondered the burgeoning big picture.

"Should we always be online, always connected? I'm not so sure that's a positive thing. We have to start making decisions about whether we want to be on the grid, 24/7," noted Jon Taplin, a communications professor at the University of Southern California.

"Whatever media I consume, I try to remember what ideological agendas I am exposed to, and correct for it," said Adam Greenfield, a panelist and author of "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing."

Bob Boorstin, a spokesman for Google, was not worried that Web-based political groups would threaten the nation's traditional two-party system. "I'm excited that the orthodoxy is challenged. If the Internet enables MoveOn.com and other organizations, I'm all for that," he said.

The political mainstream already may be hip to technology, disruptive and otherwise.

Maria Cino, president and chief executive officer of the 2008 Republican National Convention, announced yesterday that the Sept. 1-4 event would be the most "tech-savvy in history" via new partnerships with Google, YouTube, Qwest and bloggers "both emerging and traditional."

"This isn't your father's GOP — but Dad is still a proud Republican," noted convention spokesman Ryan James.


The GOP eCampaign guru's for the 21st Century ..

Fred08.com: An Outside Insider’s View

Online Video Audience Surges

Online Video Audience Surges
by Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet Project

The audience for YouTube and other internet video sites has risen sharply the past year. Nearly half of online adults now say they have ever visited such sites. And, on a typical day at the end of 2007, the share of internet users visiting video sites was nearly twice as large as it had been at the end of 2006. The basic findings in a national phone survey that ended in December show:

48% of internet users said they had ever visited a video-sharing site such as YouTube. A year ago, in December 2006, 33% of internet users said they had ever visited such sites. That represents growth of more than 45% year-to-year.
15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site "yesterday" -- the day before they were contacted for our survey. A year ago, 8% had visited such a site "yesterday." Thus, on an average day, the number of users of video sites nearly doubled from the end of 2006 to the end of 2007.

The dramatic growth in the population using video-sharing sites is tied at least in part to the popularity of such sites among men, younger adults (those under age 30), and college graduates. Nearly a third of wired young adults (30%) watch a video on a site like YouTube on a typical day and fully a fifth of online men (20%) do the same.

At the same time, growth in daily traffic surged among some other demographic groups including:

women, whose use on an average day jumped from 5% to 11% (or an increase of 120%)

those ages 30 to 49, whose use on a typical day increased from 7% to 14% (or an increase of 100%)

and high school graduates, whose use on a typical day grew from 5% to 13% (or an increase of 160%).

Growth in traffic is also linked to the spread of broadband connections. In our December 2006 survey, 45% of all American adults said they had broadband at home and in this most recent survey, 54% of all adults have high-speed connections at home.

Other factors are almost certainly at play in the growth of video site usage. One element is that there are more videos on sites like YouTube now than there were a year ago. Some of that growth comes from people posting their own amateur videos on such sites. In our most recent survey, we found that 22% of Americans shoot their own videos and that 14% of them post some of that video online. That is more than triple the percentage of video takers who said they had posted videos when we asked a similar question in a survey taken in February-April 2006.

The growth in sharing site usage also links to a larger story on the internet about widespread use of video offered by all kinds of websites. This phenomenon was documented in our report "Online Video".

Find additional information on the survey along with the questionnaire and topline findings at pewinternet.org

Notes

1Results are from a survey of 2,054 American adults (age 18 and older) conducted between October 24 and December 2, 2007. The number of internet users asked the video-sharing question was 1,359. The margin of error on the sample of internet users is plus or minus 3 percentage points.